BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Reviewed by Nancy Selleck
University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Mary Thomas Crane's Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive
Theory makes an impressive contribution to Shakespeare scholarship
as well as to the fledgling field of cognitive literary studies.
Acknowledging that cognitive science is still at a "primitive" and controversial
stage, she nevertheless makes a strong case for the usefulness of some
of its findings about how the brain makes sense of the world, organizes
experience into categories, and participates in the cultural process
of language. Her use of cognitive theory focuses primarily on
Shakespeare's choice of words, understood to be "shaped and constrained"
by cognitive processes and structures (15). With its emphasis
on the "embodied brain" as opposed to the immaterial, post-Cartesian
"mind," Crane's book joins the still growing field of scholarship focusing
on the body, and, more broadly, on the "material" dimensions of culture.
But unlike the majority of such studies, Crane's also rejects key aspects
of contemporary theory and aims to address its limitations via cognitive
science. Her title is deliberately provocative, and her approach
modifies the theoretical basis for asserting connections between Shakespeare's
texts and their physical and social contexts. Crane is particularly
interested in mapping a reciprocal relationship between the subject
and its world--which is to say, in getting beyond the determinism of
much post-structuralist criticism and reopening the question of authorial
agency. For Crane, the "embodied brain" is the site where culture
and biology meet to form the subject and produce texts, but it is also
the locus of individual activity, both conscious and unconscious.
Thus it offers a way around "the current critical impasse between those
who assume an author with conscious control over the text he produces
and those who assume that cultural construction leaves little or no
room for authorial agency" (16). One measure of Crane's achievement
with this book lies in the depth and specificity of its challenges to
current thinking on both sides of that major issue.

In a highly readable theoretical introduction, Crane offers an ambitious
critique of post-structural theory, analyzing in particular the shortcomings,
from a cognitive perspective, of the Saussurean premises on which some
key elements of Derridean, Foucauldian, and Lacanian theory rest.
Whereas Saussure saw language as an autonomous system of arbitrary signs
whose meaning is based on difference rather than on any extrasystemic
reality, cognitive theorists see language as partly "shaped, or 'motivated,'
by its origins in the neural systems of a human body as they interact
with other human bodies and an environment" (11). Thus cognitive
subjects "are not simply determined by the symbolic order in which they
exist; instead, they shape (and are also shaped by) meanings that are
determined by an interaction of the physical world, culture, and human
cognitive systems" (12). Cognitive theory recognizes "the preeminence
of fuzzy categories in human mental functioning" without therein finding
a "complete lack of agency or a triumph of irrationality" (13); by contrast,
Derridean theory betrays an underlying expectation of a logical and
unified human cognition, which it keeps rediscovering as false.
And whereas Saussurean formalism posits nothing "outside the text,"
in cognitive theory "meaning is anchored (although ambiguously and insecurely)
by a three-way tether: brain, culture, discourse" (24).

Also crucial to this revised understanding of agency is a broad conception
of unconscious functioning--not the Freudian or Lacanian unconscious
made up of repressed thoughts and desires, but the whole cognitive interface
between the subject and its world. The fact that most of these
mental processes take place out of awareness does not mean that the
subject is not performing them. Thus Crane can see Shakespeare's
brain as one "origin" of his texts without implying his "complete conscious
control over them." She can posit "Shakespeare as an agent,
conceiving of that agency as partly conscious and partly unconscious,
with an unconscious component that reflects cognitive as well as affective
categories" (19).

Crane's discussion suggests that properly to theorize a subject embedded
in its context is not to nullify the agency of the subject, but to reconceive
agency as a cooperative process, and to take the physicality of the
subject quite seriously in that reconception. Thus she contrasts
the Foucauldian deconstruction of the author with her own emphasis on
the physical reality of the author's body, which Foucauldian materialist
critics "disperse . . . into an immaterial author-function" (3-4).
Without rejecting the complexity of the Foucauldian subject, she shows
that the physical-spatial emphasis of cognitive theory can supplement
it, addressing in particular a one-way conception of power that scholars
have increasingly found inadequate in recent years. Crane argues
that a more active conception of a cognitive subject that "participates
in the creation of meaning as it interacts with material culture" (17)
offers a more flexible theoretical framework for analyzing both the
subject's role and its representation in culture, and her readings of
Shakespeare often bear this out.

Less convincing is Crane's claim that a cognitive approach offers "a
more radical materialism than does current Marxist theory, since it
attempts to explore the literally material origins of the self" (17).
Why is it any more radically materialist to consider the biological
bases of cognition than to consider the social and economic conditions
that surround the person? Surely the latter are as "literally
material"; the difference is rather that they also lie outside the self,
whereas the subject of Crane's focus--the embodied brain--belongs more
properly to it. It would seem more accurate, then, to say that
a cognitive approach allows a more individually based materialism.
This may indeed be part of its appeal for Crane, for such an emphasis
inflects some of her readings. In Measure for Measure,
for instance, despite her sense that "this most preeminently cognitive
play" depicts the necessity of interpersonal influence and penetration,
she underplays the extent to which the play embraces that necessity.
Instead, she finds it deeply resistant to such insights, seeing in the
Duke an underlying "fantasy" of the "solitary 'completeness' and inviolability"
of the individual (177).

This is not the only moment when Crane's specific readings seem less
radical than her theoretical challenge; yet since the implications of
that challenge keep unfolding with each chapter, one needn't agree with
every argument to find the book compelling and valuable throughout.
On the whole, Crane's approach is integrative rather than polemical,
and she repeatedly throws into dialogue representatives of different
disciplinary perspectives that have not yet been talking with each other.
In her individual discussions of plays she brings in a wealth of cultural
materials, and she manages to incorporate a wide range of critical readings
of Shakespeare into her own arguments. This inclusive tendency
finds a counterpart in her "cognitive" view of Shakespeare's own authorial
functioning, allowing her to read the plays not as evincing particular
viewpoints but as "trying out" many different possibilities. Hamlet,
for instance, represents neither a new version of the self nor an older
notion, but "a range of spatially delineated possibilities: there is,
or is not, an essential self . . . that works as a stable locus of agency;
this self can, or cannot, be reliably expressed; actions do, or do not,
create the self" (117). Crane's point, of course, is not simply
that we can read both possibilities in Shakespeare's complex
text, but that the play itself is a deliberate cognitive exploration
of problems of human consciousness and action, and Shakespeare a kind
of cognitive theorist.

Indeed, her fundamental view of the plays is that they are all cognitive
investigations. Methodologically, this approach centers on an
exploration of word usage. In each play she analyzes, Crane discovers
a group of polysemic words that form a network of ideas around which
the play is built. Generally they are words whose meanings are
shifting at the time Shakespeare is writing, and the plays analyze how
and why they are changing. The chapter on Comedy ofErrors,
for instance, shows that that play's emphasis on the words house,
home, and mart signals its deep concern with the spatial
orientation of the self in the context of changing conceptions of public
and private spaces. In Twelfth Night, she elaborates the
multiple forms and meanings of "suit"--its related or contradictory
senses of passive conformity, willful pursuit, and dressing to display
or to disguise--in relation to the characters' various modes of identity
and desire. In As You Like It, she surveys the changing
ideologies of social mobility reflected in the various uses of "villain"
and "clown," connecting these also with changes in early modern theatrical
practice. At the heart of Measure for Measure she finds
a preoccupation with the word "pregnant," which for Shakespeare "named
the multiple ways that bodies are penetrated by the external world and
produce something--offspring, ideas, language--as a result of that penetration"
(159). Starting with word use, Crane is able to take her arguments
in many fruitful and interconnected directions. For instance,
most of her chapters link the social and cognitive issues under discussion
with some practical aspect of the theater--its staging of private and
public spaces, its different types of clowns, its use of music or costumes
or soliloquy. But whatever she connects them to, the groups of
words both anchor and drive her complex discussions.

It is a powerful methodology, largely because it relies on the historicity
of language. In Crane's hands, Shakespeare's famous preoccupation
with wordplay becomes much more than a mental habit. Her arguments
suggest that such wordplay is really an engagement with history--a registering
and interrogating of significant social changes. It represents
Shakespeare's understanding of the word as a site of cultural debate,
as the material embodiment and trace of key social tensions. Shakespeare
is playing not just with language, but with the social circumstances
behind its changing uses.

Crane's attention to early modern language can also have implications
for our own critical vocabulary. In her chapter on The Tempest,
she argues against the critical practice of treating "discourse" as
the disembodied product of abstract "power relations," a practice which
she says "effaces the role of individual subjects in the production
of language" (179). Arguing that The Tempest represents
discourse as "a metaphorically based radial category with fuzzy boundaries"
(178), she takes account of the way the play often links or undermines
speech with a great variety of other, non-discursive sounds--music,
thunder, cries of pain, etc. This chapter struck me as the most
unusual and provocative of her readings, showing how a cognitive approach
provokes different concerns than most current critical approaches.
Her attention to the physical production of sound (as a matter of play
production as well as human psychology) allows Crane to read The
Tempest as "patently about the relationship between sound and space,
about the ways in which language creates but is also created (and disrupted)
by a physical environment" (179). She cautions against analyses
of "discourse" that oversimplify the issue of Prospero's control or
power, suggesting instead that the play reveals "the failures of discourse
to control the material world," and represents a "meditation on the
difficult interrelationships between the 'natural' and the 'discursive'"
(180).

In the sheer variety of issues it raises, as well as the wealth of
materials and viewpoints it digests, Shakespeare's Brain offers
much to the field of early modern cultural studies. Its interpretative
arguments are always rich and subtle, and the book as a whole presents
genuinely new ways of reading Shakespeare in historical context.
I expect that its theoretical claims will have the most resonance for
scholars both within and beyond Renaissance studies. For the book succeeds
in demonstrating a more complex understanding of the subject as a socially
embedded agent--an idea we need no longer take as a contradiction in
terms, but can try to map in increasingly varied and nuanced relation
to its political and cultural contexts.